So my gentoo hard drive died not to long ago and I've always wanted to try out using a SSD. So my question is how reliable is Gentoo on a SSD given that compiling packages will write to the HD quite a bit and could kill the HD. I usually update packages twice a week but with a SSD i will probably not do that so often.

Last edited by <3 on Sat Jul 13, 2013 11:37 am; edited 1 time in total

A USB hard drive comes in handy. I installed gentoo on one and it builds all the binaries I need for installation to the SSD. Having all your downloaded packages and binaries on a usb drive also saves a lot of space on your SSD.

I've been using 2 80gb Intel SSD drives now in different boxes for probably more than 3 years and both are going fine still. That includes having /var/tmp onboard. I emerge once a week usually. OTOH I always lose the swapfile except for one place on a laptop where I might be hibernating. That one is an OCZ vertex 3 that shares with a win7 install and is only about 1 1/2 years old. I don't bother updating that one that often.

I just bought 8GB more ram so I will have a total of 12GB which should be plenty (Hopefully). My guess is, it will be enough to put /var/tmp/portage in tmpfs. I will probably mount swap to an old mechanical hard drive (not sure I will even be using swap much with 12GB of ram but since it is required for hibernation I will enable it).

BTW, I have run my gentoo / mthtv htpc on an 80GB Intel G1 SSD every single day since 2009. At last check it had 95% life left in it. So I would not worry so much. For the last 2 or so years I use btrfs for the OS and portage.